Sharp Veins’s new single is the kind of lullaby your hard drive might hum

The video serves as a scrapbook of forgotten YouTube clips.

A couple of years ago, someone dear to me played me Sharp Veins, something from their Inbox Island EP on Irish label Glacial Sound. It stood out because its composition was poetically spare, yet its sonic references wide — as if the sum of contemporary electronic music had been put through a shredder and the remaining scraps arranged in a heartfelt message.

ADVERTISEMENT

This week, the New York-based producer announced a new record with UNO NYC called bleeds colors and puddles, a title that also hints at a shredded aesthetic. Fittingly the first single "learn boxing miami" squishes a mountain of static and tuneful mouth sounds together into the kind of lullaby your hard drive might hum. The video for it, premiering above, mirrors that approach with a cut'n'paste amalgam of touching amateur footage from YouTube.

"I read about data rot on Wikipedia then opened Ableton and out came 'learn boxing miami,'" Sharp Veins told me over email. "It's about gleefully losing your memories. Seth [Halter], the director, said it made him think of someone looking at their phone while watching TV. We collected fragments from home videos and culled moments from infrequently visited corners of YouTube. Seth layered these into something fidgety, then Jason [Voltaire] put an advanced rotoscopic sheen on all of it. I guess I know we're all of us going to forget most things, but I like seeing people try to preserve their moments, however insignificant they might seem. The video is a big, nervous memorial to that.”

UNO NYC will release Sharp Veins's new EP, bleeds colors and puddles, on October 20. Preorder it here.